"There are no small number of people in this world who, solitary by nature, always try to go back into their shell like a hermit crab or a snail."

Anton Chekhov Literature See all quotes by Anton Chekhov →

React to this quote

More by Anton Chekhov

“The world is a fine place. The only thing wrong with it is us. How little justice and humility there is in us, how poorly we understand patriotism!”

“Despicable means used to achieve laudable goals render the goals themselves despicable.”

“Writers are as jealous as pigeons.”

“Moscow is a city that has much suffering ahead of it.”

“It’s worth living abroad to study up on genteel and delicate manners. The maid smiles continuously; she smiles like a duchess on a stage, while at the same time it is clear from her face that she is exhausted from overwork.”

“There are no lower or higher or median moralities. There is only one morality, and it is precisely the one that was given to us during the time of Jesus Christ and that stops me, you and Barantsevich from stealing, offending others, lying etc.”

Resonant Thoughts

"The natural history of these islands is eminently curious, and well deserves attention. Most of the organic productions are aboriginal creations, found nowhere else; there is even a difference between…"

— Charles Darwin

Science1758–1778

#nature

"Since sounds have no natural connection with our ideas … the doubtfulness and uncertainty of their signification … has its cause more in the ideas they stand for than in any incapacity there is in one…"

— John Locke

Philosophy1943–2006

#nature

"It is the nature of men, having escaped one extreme, which by force they were constrained long to endure, to run headlong into the other extreme, forgetting that virtue doth always consist in the mean…"

— Walter Raleigh

Politics1552–1618

#nature

"There are many that I know and I know it. They are many that I know and they know it. They are all of them themselves and they repeat it and I hear it. Always I listen to it. Slowly I come to understa…"

— Gertrude Stein

Literature1874–1946

#knowledge